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Wednesday, May 20, 2009

More use for Embolisms (Emblems of Heroism)

So with my shoulder needing some rest I've been trying to stay away from computers a bit. This means no playing WoW all evening, every evening. This used to make me very restless. So restless that I had a hard time sitting though a film, or reading a book. I used to find myself back in the game every time I could.

Funny enough, at the moment it's not too bad. Yeah sure, I keep thinking about things I had planned on doing in game, or of course my blog, but I manage to slide it to the side more easily than not so long ago. I think somehow the need to be there all the time is disappearing.

I'm a PVEer. I PVP a little, but most of my enjoyment in the game comes from facing dungeon and raid encounters. Every week again I look forward to raiding Ulduar in the weekend, it's where I get my WoW high, what keeps me going. But outside the weekend there's nothing left in the game like that at the moment. There are no challenges left to face that you can just pick up easily. All of my current challenges lie in raiding, and there's just no way we can get enough people together to raid all the time.

So what do you do when dungeons, even the heroic ones, have no goal anymore but to gear up alts, or your friends' alts? There are two options the game currently offers, chase achievements, or fiddle around with pvp a bit more.

Well, I've chased so many achievements already that the ones left are the tedious ones, the ones that you really don't want to fill an evening with. So I end up in PVP, in fact like many others I end up in Wintergrasp. And more and more people seem to come to the same conclusion, since Wintergrasp has become laggier and laggier lately.

Blizzard is trying to fight this by changing the Wintergrasp dailies to weeklies. I can tell them right now, it won't work. Those people aren't all in Wintergrasp for the dailies, they're there because they have too few other options to engage themselves in without little or no preparation and organization.

I hear sounds like this on other blogs left and right. People are less motivated, feel like the game is losing it's shine. Well, I'm still in love with this game as much as ever, but I just don't manage to fill the same hours with it as I did before.

Instead of trying to take stuff away from Wintergrasp and trying to make it less attractive, Blizzard should really start thinking about what they can offer to the players to grab their attention elsewhere.

My option for Blizzard would be to come with something that makes it worth running heroics again. Makes it worth running Naxx. Give people something to do with those emblems of heroism that are now just piling up. Give them something to work towards, something that will help them in their real goal: raiding.

It could perhaps be an extra gemslot on one of your gear pieces for 500 embolisms. I bet that would get all the min maxers out doing heroics like all hell. It could also be a badge of conquest for 100 embolisms, it would offer people a way to do something about their improvement outside of raids.

Another option would be to have people earn themselves a road into a specific quest line with emblems of heroism. Hand in 200 embolisms to do a quest line throughout the dungeons, and give something as a reward. It would be a whole new way to doing your daily quests. The reward could be a gear upgrade, item level 219 or so. It allows people to upgrade their gear in a very, very slow fashion, but through a very fun way of doing so. It would give people something to do again, something that would keep them busy for a while as well.

And hey, as long as I'm on the subject anyway...I still think I should get my purple cat. Maybe they can introduce that for 5000 emblems of heroism...